SDNY COURTHOUSE, July 19 – During the trial that convicted Tony Hernandez, the brother of Honduras' president Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH), on all four counts of guns and narcotics trafficking and false statements, the Honduran National Police came up again and again in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
And now in July, Honduran journalist David Romero Ellner has died of respiratory failure after contracting COVID-19 while imprisoned at the Támara National Penitentiary. With a history of killing witnesses in prison, JOH authorities had transferred Romero to the National Cardiopulmonary Institute on July 5. Romero was the director of the media outlets Radio Globo and Globo TV, see below.
On June 29 SDNY Judge P. Kevin Castel held a bond hearing on Otto Rene Salguero Morales. Inner City Press live tweeted it, now here.
Inner City Press will continue to cover this and related cases. All questions to the UN, where Antonio Guterres and spokesmen bragged of getting $50,000 from JOH's Honduras, presumptively some Chapo funds, have gone unanswered. Stephane Dujarric won't even take the questions, including about his role in working with Sri Lanka war criminal Palitha Kohona and UNCA to oust Inner City Press, story here, Kohona here), from one dictatorship to another the UN continues.
As to David Romero, it is said that the Committee to Protect Journalists' Natalie Southwick emailed the Honduran Secretariat for the Protection of Human Rights asking for comment on Romero but did not receive a reply. While CPJ did conclusorily reply to Inner City Press' request for action about UN censorship, nothing has been done.
Inner City Press wrote, to CPJ's Joel Simon and others, "This follows up on my previous requests to you for CPJ. I am still banned from the UN and its Zoom room / briefing, 720 days and counting. None of Inner City Press' daily written questions, about Cameroon, Honduras, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Yemen, and UN finances are being answered. No response to application for accreditation submitted to Antonio Guterres' head of Communications Melissa Fleming. Trigger for this question on deadline: today former Sri Lanka ambassador Palitha Kohona published an article admitting to having used UN Correspondent Association and correspondents you work with in order to get Inner City Press ousted and banned from the UN. See here. Question: what are you going to do about this?"
A CPJ staffer replied, "Hi Matt, Thank you for reaching out, and apologies for the delayed response. Given the impact of COVID-19 on the press and the staggering number of recent attacks on the press, our team has been stretched thin and we ask for your patience as we are working through a high volume of urgent cases at this time. This is indeed a very concerning article, and we’ve shared this information with our colleagues on the research side to see if they can look into this further and see what, if anything, we can do."
That was on June 24. Four weeks later, nothing at all was done. CPJ is in the bag with the UN of Guterres. Protection of journalists? We'll have more on this.
This while still-free President Juan Orlando Hernandez, implicated in the case, is now promoting hydroxychloroquine as countering Covid-19, and seeks $340 million from the IMF, here.
Also during Tony Hernandez' trial, the drug ledgers of one Nery Orlando López Sanabria a/k/a Magdaleno were used by the SDNY prosecutors.
Here is an Inner City Press tweeted photo of notebook mentioning "JOH," in Spanish. Inner City Press has repeated asked the United Nations, in New York and Geneva, for comment. Dead silence.
A week after the Tony Hernandez verdict, Magdaleno was murdered in a supposedly maximum security prison in Santa Barbara, Honduras.
The video are very troubling [WARNING] including the guards letting the killers in, here.
At 9 am on October 28 Geneva time Inner City Press in writing asked UN "High Commissioner for Human Rights" Michelle Bachelet and her spokesman Rupert Colville this: "Hello, this is a Press request for OHCHR / Bachelet comment on the murder, on video, in Honduras of 'Magdeleno' whose drug trafficking notebook were used in recent SDNY conviction of Presidential brother Tony Hernandez, a trial Inner City Press covered every day. See video of killing here.
More on Patreon here.
On October 26 after the murder and release of the video, Inner City Press went to (try to) pose the question to Guterres. The response? Video here. Three UN security vehicles, and even a publicly funded NYPD detective, "protecting" Guterres who already wastes untold public funds on security. Disgusting. A protest has been called for, and is needed - @InnerCityPress response here. More on Patreon here.
The case is US v. Diaz Morales, 15-cr-00379 (Castel).
